Air/Light Magazine
Sunday, July 10th
5pm to 7pm
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In celebration of Air/Light's first 5 issues and the upcoming publication of issue 6, we're having a party... a reading party! We're thrilled to host contributors from across our six issues:
bridgette bianca
Alex Espinoza
Carribean Fragoza
Edan Lepucki
Jose Hernandez Diaz
Naomi Hirahara
Lilliam Rivera
Lynne Thompson
Ben Loory
Air/Light is an online literary journal that showcases both traditional and innovative works. We are firmly of the West Coast, but also national, international. We mean to look out expansively from this place rather than to gaze narrowly back at it, to express a West Coast aesthetic, a West Coast sensibility, and direct that lens onto the world. We are published by the English Department at the University of Southern California.
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bridgette bianca is a poet and professor from South Central Los Angeles. When she is not sharing her own poetry, she co-curates two literary series, Making Room for Black Women and the Women’s Center for Creative Work Reading Series. be/trouble (Writ Large Press) is her debut collection of poetry.
Alex Espinoza earned his MFA from UC Irvine and is the author of the novels Still Water Saints (Random House) and The Five Acts of Diego León (Random House). His most recent book is Cruising: An Intimate History of a Radical Pastime (Unnamed Press). He’s written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, and NPR’s All Things Considered. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony, as well as an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, he is the Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at UC Riverside. This story is drawn from a new novel, tentatively titled The Moment We Touch Ground.
Carribean Fragoza was raised in South El Monte, California. She co-edits UC Press’s California cultural journal, Boom California, and is the founder of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared numerous publications, including BOMB, Huizache, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the co-editor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (Rutgers University Press) and coordinator of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award at Claremont Graduate University. Her debut collection of stories, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, is forthcoming from City Lights Books.
Edan Lepucki is the author of the novella If You’re Not Yet Like Me and the novels California and Woman No. 17.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press). His work has been published in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, the Los Angeles Times, LitHub, The Nation, Poetry, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Currently, he is an Associate Editor at Frontier Poetry and a Guest Editor at Palette Poetry. He has taught creative writing for Litro Magazine and Sevilla Writers House.
Naomi Hirahara is an award-winning author of multiple traditional mystery series and noir short stories. Her Mas Arai mysteries, which have been published in Japanese, Korean and French, feature a Los Angeles gardener and Hiroshima survivor who solves crimes. The third Mas Arai mystery, Snakeskin Shamisen (Delta) which was set in Gardena and Torrance, won an Edgar Award for best paperback original, while the seventh and final Mas Arai mystery, Hiroshima Boy (Prospect Park Books), was nominated for the same award. Her first historical mystery is Clark and Division, (Soho Press) which follows a Japanese American family’s move to Chicago in 1944 after being released from a California wartime detention center. Her second Leilani Santiago Hawai‘i mystery, An Eternal Lei (Prospect Park Books), is scheduled to be released in 2022.
Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning author of children’s books, including her latest young adult novel Never Look Back (Bloomsbury). Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and Elle. A Bronx, New York native, she lives in Los Angeles.
Lynne Thompson is the author of Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press), which won the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award in 2008. Her other books include Start With A Small Guitar (What Books Press) and Fretwork, winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize and published by Marsh Hawk Press. New work is forthcoming in december, Ninth Letter, and Rosebud.
Ben Loory is an American short story writer. His first book, Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day (Penguin 2011), was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and was named one of the 10 Best Fiction Books of the Year by Hudson Booksellers. His second book, Tales of Falling and Flying (Penguin 2017), was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the staff of The Paris Review, and one of the 50 Best Fantasy Books of All Time by Esquire Magazine. Loory’s fables and tales have appeared in The New Yorker, BOMB Magazine, Fairy Tale Review, and A Public Space, and been heard on This American Life and Selected Shorts. They have also been adapted to short film, live theater, chamber music, and dance, and been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish, and Indonesian. Loory is a graduate of Harvard University and holds an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute. He lives and teaches short story writing in Los Angeles, and is also the author of a picture book for children, The Baseball Player and the Walrus (Dial Books for Young Readers, 2015).